Recently, it was reported on alm.com that customers are increasingly turning away from one-stop shops and toward individual technological solutions. Similar comments have also been heard in Viennese legal circles. What is behind all this?
First of all, a paradigm shift is taking place. Up to now, law firms have usually aimed to use as few products as possible in order to avoid interface issues and to have the greatest possible transparency in terms of costs and use. If a change of direction is now on the horizon, surely there must be some dissatisfaction?
Indeed, proponents of diversification say that "one" product is not capable of meeting the highly diverse needs of individual practice groups in larger organizations. One would add that experience with legacy law firm management software also shows how once agile developments can become quite cumbersome monoliths - at least from the customer's perspective. But are isolated products the solution?
The moment to answer this question has not yet come. In any case, an absolute prerequisite would be a standardization of interfaces across providers, and if possible even across countries. This is not easy to imagine. But at least a sum of individual products could definitely develop faster than large "tankers". For this to happen, however, the "top dogs" among the software manufacturers would have to abandon their policy of isolation and approach other, mostly newer, providers. One can hope for that.
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